TransferGo, a London-based money transfer company, added three new locations to their 45-strong country portfolio this week: it now operates in India, the Philippines and Ukraine. For this reason, TransferGo’s CEO and Co-Founder Daumantas Dvilinskas shares his insights regarding challenges that FinTech companies face whilst entering new and distant markets. He suggests that opening first transfer corridors was the most difficult part, and yet the company still needs to alter their product to get the approvals to operate in particular markets.

For all FinTechs it's challenging to open a new business branch or transfer corridor, whether you’d call it exotic or not. Because of our business model, for TransferGo opening a new corridor is a very important, yet challenging task, as we need to have bank accounts in all the countries we operate. So, for us, it's not only entering the market but also entering the regulated banking system.

We have people that work entirely on those issues: how to open the account, how to manage the regulations, how to make sure we're compliant with FCA and also with local laws. We sometimes need to adjust our product just to comply with some laws and that is definitely more common in destinations outside of the EU, where the regulations are all the same.

However, we're always willing to make those changes, if it means we can serve more people and fulfil our promise to give access to fast, cheap and safe money transfers to everyone, everywhere. In terms of leverage, the fact that we already have 45 bank partners, including high street banks and over 50 bank accounts, speaks for itself. For us it's just as important to maintain good relationships as it is to broaden our network, which we've been successfully doing for 4 years already and we have no plans to stop until we make real-time money transfers a global standard accessible to everyone.

It's more and more common for banks and FinTech to cooperate, especially in the main 'FinTech' hubs like London, Berlin or even New York. In some ways it's easier to enter new markets there, because people know what FinTech is and everyone finds it less scary to get into the conversation. At the same time; they’re hubs so the competition is huge, but we're happy to see that TransferGo as a brand is now well known and respected as a thought-leader in banking relationships among the right circles, which definitely helps in expanding our business.

We have 45 countries on our list at the moment and we're adding more corridors at a rate of one per month. Some of the most difficult were the first ones, just because we lacked experience and examples of successful partnerships. Now it's much easier because we have a lot to show. Still, as mentioned before, sometimes slight alterations in product have to be made to seal the deal.